De Smith says the NFL is the "first league in the history of sports that has ever sued to not play their game," which, like a lot of slogans, isn't entirely accurate (the NFL hasn't sued), even if it accurately conveys the sense that the NFL is taking great pains to get its lockout. Mike Florio has some thoughts about this, and his analysis leads me to wonder: Would Florio or Gunga Peter or any of the rest of the Serious Football Media ever write anything so blithely, head-pattingly condescending as this about Roger Goodell's rhetoric?

Would they look at, say, a piece of nonsense sloganeering like Goodell's Wall Street Journal op-ed last month and call it for what it is, which is nothing less than a tour de force of wackadoodle science fiction that might as well have Klingons and phaser guns? (That was the piece in which Goodell moons over the old collective-bargaining arrangement that his owners elected to torch, the one in which the commissioner comes off like a guy who, having pissed on everyone's doorstep and chucked bricks through all their windows, wonders innocently why the neighborhood has gone to shit.) Surely that op-ed was every bit as unserious and counterproductive as De Smith bungling his tort law. Would they write, as Florio does today, "Anyone who gets it understands what's happening," and then engage in all sorts of mock clairvoyance about the desperation Roger Goodell must be feeling?